Aside from a few crazed individuals, people laugh when they're happy. While we suppose that the heartier laughers are happier than the rest of us, how much happier is that? As I wrote in an earlier article (The Happiness Equation, July 25, 2016), scientists have been making efforts to quantifyhappiness. In the past, happiness was not easy to quantify, and it was more a topic of the occasional happiness quizzes in the Sunday supplement than a topic for scientific study. Ubiquitous computing has now given us better tools with which we might quantify happiness.

So, how does this study quantify happiness? As for most such studies, it's done through a survey. The country rankings are based on the Gallup World Poll surveys for the years, 2015-2017.[2] The study participants, more than 1,000 in each country, were asked this simple, subjectivequestion,

"Imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?"

This is called a Cantril ladder. A thousand people from each country were typically sampled in each year, so the happiness index for each country over the three year period was optimally based on 3,000 people, although data for some countries were lacking.[2] A sample size of 3,000 gives a fairly good 95% confidence interval.[2] The average score ranged from 7.6 for Finland to 2.9 for Burundi.[3]

The differences between the top countries are small enough that that year-to-year changes in the rankings are expected.[2] Nordic countries are regularly in the top five, while countries at war and some sub-Saharan Africa countries rank regularly as the bottom five.[3] Togo, which was in last place since 2015, showed an increase in valuation of 1.2/10 points, while Venezuela dropped 2.2/10 points.[2]

Several reasons for the falling position of the US were noted in the report, and these included "a complex and worsening public health crisis, involving...obesity, opioid addiction and major depressive disorder," and income inequality.[4] Income inequality was a major reason for unhappiness in the US, and it isn't present to such a great extent in other countries with similarly high-income levels.[4]

As the survey shows, the grass can be greener on the other side of the fence. The ranking of countries by their immigrant populations is almost exactly the same as for their native population. Finland is first ranked by both populations.[2] Finland has a population of about 5.5 million, 300,000 of whom were immigrants in 2016.[4] John Helliwell, an editor of the 2018 World Happiness Report, is quoted by the Voice of America as saying, "Those who move to happier countries gain, while those who move to less happy countries lose."[4]

There's a saying that money can't buy happiness, and there appears to be evidence of this in the Easterlin Paradox. This paradox is that the per capita gross domestic product in the US has more than doubled since 1972 while happiness has been roughly stagnant with some declines (see graph). It appears that certain non-income determinants of happiness in the US are worsening as the per capita income has risen. Helliwell has associated this paradox with the five factors cited above; namely, population health (measured by health-adjusted life expectancy), the strength of social support networks, personal freedom, social trust (measured by the public's perception of government and business corruption), and generosity.[2]